It was close to midnight, and dozens of people — a few of whom, clad in club wear, came straight from a Charli XCX and Troye Sivan concert — had gathered at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. As the hour approached, the crowd began to count down: “… nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!” Cheers, flashes abounded.
No, this was not an out-of-season New Year’s party, but the launch of Sally Rooney’s highly anticipated new novel, “Intermezzo,” on Tuesday, which for many revelers brought an excitement they hadn’t seen since the 2007 release of the final Harry Potter book.
Seconds after the clock struck 12, a bookstore employee whisked off a black-and-gold tablecloth covering the biggest reveal of the evening: A mountain of neatly stacked, signed copies of “Intermezzo” for attendees to snag on their way out.
“That’s the centerpiece of midnight parties, that moment that everyone’s waiting for,” said Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo, Greenlight’s owner and co-founder. “There’s just so much joy in being in a group of people who are all there for the same thing.”
Greenlight’s book launch is one of more than 140 events happening across the country this week to celebrate the arrival of Rooney’s fourth novel, according to the author’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Along with signed copies of the book, participating bookstores offered readers trivia games, raffles and book swag that included puzzles of the book’s yellow-and-gray chessboard cover, pins shaped like chess pieces and black Baggu bags printed with the book’s title and Rooney’s name.
“Intermezzo” tells the story of two brothers — Peter, a successful lawyer, and Ivan, a competitive chess player — whose soured relations are further strained with the death of their father. Peter and Ivan navigate grief as they each get caught up in their own complicated relationships, a familiar subject to anyone who has read Rooney’s previous novels, “Conversations with Friends” (2017) and “Normal People” (2018).
Rooney’s rise — further bolstered by the release of “Beautiful World, Where Are You” and its accompanying book swag in 2021 — has become a literary phenomenon, even by today’s standards of fame. Her name is synonymous with a particular cultural cachet, a weather vane that’s finely tuned to the anxieties and intricacies of modern dating, power and class.
It’s the kind of material that might attract a fan base whose demographic profiles more closely resemble Rooney’s, who is 33. But those were also the qualities that drew Sally Smith, 80, to the author’s work.
“She knows how to write characters that are so realistic,” said Smith, a retired professor of language arts who attended a release party at Books Are Magic, in Brooklyn.
“I don’t know what I expected from this event,” Smith said, “but I’ve never talked about her books with anyone else, so maybe now is a chance.”
Fans connected through Rooney and “Intermezzo”-themed activities: At Books Are Magic, they sipped Irish breakfast tea and answered Rooney trivia questions. At McNally Jackson Books, in Manhattan, some guests sat outside on wooden picnic tables and played chess. And at Greenlight, they played a version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey: pin-the-shorts-on-Paul Mescal, the actor who played Connell in the 2020 television adaptation of “Normal People” — and whose thighs have claimed the hearts of netizens.
Every bookstore host received the same boxes of promotional items from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but were also given free rein to plan their own programming, said Sheila O’Shea, the house’s senior vice president of publicity and marketing. “What I was really excited about was how engaged the stores were in doing it and doing it the way they wanted to do it,” she said. “That was very important, and it worked.” (A majority of the book events sold out.)
Notably missing from the parties was the Irish novelist herself. But her absence didn’t bother Rooney lovers too much. “It would have been nice to meet her, but I feel like there’s a sense of community around Sally Rooney fans,” said Michelle Shevchenko, 23, a media planner and Bookstagrammer who attended the Books Are Magic party.
“If you see someone and they’re reading her book and they like it,” she said, “it’s like having a conversation with a friend.”
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